I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation.
I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.
But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people that you want to mingle with.
However, the "standard" of shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated for your).
Therefore, you do have to struggle with more subpar shows.
Not sure what to do with that.
I find that I've mostly made up for that part by participating in online discussions.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
Im the complete opposite and never watch anything that is on-going because I hate waiting around for every episode and having series drawn out over months. And even after they have completed there is usually little fanfare or noticed that a season is complete and so it is only a 50% chance I will watch it at all even if I am interested in it because all the talk about it has since died and it is forgotten about because it was going on for months already.
I didn't mind what Andor did as much though for season 2 releasing 3 episodes at a time. If it had just been 1 episode at a time I probably wouldn't have seen it until a year or two from now after all discussion was dead.
What you describe is and has always been everyday life for me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even then, there's usually minimal overlap.
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
You should be enjoying your own company the most, then may come others. Communities do not have to die at some point, unless you mean it in the same sense as "well, we all die at some point". You can preserve chat history of communities, but Discord these days would be pretty shit for that, I would say.
They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
You can just use "they/them" if you don't know their gender. Much less offensive than calling someone an "it" (unless it's something they've specifically requested)
You can always watch it with them. Especially if it's great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).
I watch movies online with some friends and my girlfriend (separately), and I am 30 years old. I never liked going out to the cinema, and now I have immobility issues, so that is even less more likely, plus all my friends are abroad, so... :(
Finding friends within walking (or at least biking) distance can certainly be a hard problem (even for people in full health), but seems to be so ridiculously important for our well-being, that it's probably worth striving for.
I agree. A change of environment (to a more positive one) can save your life. I have experienced it first-hand. I have psychiatric co-morbidities (which is exacerbated by MS) but a change of environment can do wonders. The people there do not even have to be your friends (in the beginning), it can still have such a positive impact on one's mental and even physical health.
I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
This.
When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's mind.
Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
I heavily disagree with this one. On first glance what you say feels true, but there are so many mega popular people now that you will never know of despite even being from the same country. People with dozens of millions of fans, selling out arenas doing multinational tours and you won’t know them at all.
But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires so much more to reach because of how many are really locked into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able to reference the latest big movie or show and people would know, now that’s mostly turned into an explanation that the movie or show even came out and exists.
Michael Jackson was the biggest in history. Global megastar before the internet. Taylor Swift has a lot of sales but in terms of global significance and cultural impact there is no comparison. Not in the same league.
Taylor Swift has relatively niche popularity in India.
Chinese are blocked from accessing any western social media, and no access to YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc. Taylor Swift is popular there but the Chinese have their own version of the internet separate from ours.
I think you're both right. Relative to the past, any given locale is more culturally fragmented, but the globe is simultaneously more culturally unified. We've hit a weird midpoint: You might have more cultural common ground with someone on the other side of the globe who follows the same people on social media, than with your next-door neighbor.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared topics of interest?
This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization creates communication delays and a new era of cultural fragmentation.
> The entire world was talking about the same thing.
What you’re describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that way “everyone is talking about Y” and mastodon where the chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people might be talking about it, but they’re also talking about other things.
I feel that one of the most broken things about our current reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so singular and shared, but turns out that’s not the case at all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase “my internet” to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in “is your internet talking about scandal Z?” I’m frequently surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice versa).
I think you're conflating the idea of "shared culture" with "isolation from other social groups". We used to have more friends at the same time as we had more shared context thanks to media distribution patterns.
Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared.
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone listened to those that I knew).
When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now.
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts.
This has always been an issue though. I am 30 years old, and I could remember back to elementary school. I remember us bullying a girl for liking songs such a Linkin Park among other songs we (they) considered emo. For the record, I love Linkin Park now, but all the bullies never bothered to listen, and we did not know English either.
Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend. She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do. There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to rock, but yeah.
Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard because you are older?
As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design.
A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
"A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it"
You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia
if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is
because original post mention that most people on his hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown on america have same experience
Hmm I take your logical point. I think I disagree with the premises though.
> the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is
This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection anyway.
I agree with you that it's becoming the new normal. I just don't think the new normal is better, and the old normal still exists.
We opine the enshittification of social media platforms, but seem to largely ignore the enshittification of our in-person social norms and culture by those same platforms.
One of the reasons you have to get people in young (to any product) is so that they forget or just don't even realise/consider what life is could be like without it.
EDIT: There are definitely cultural norms and situations that the current norm improves upon too - perhaps regression to the mean is a better descriptor than enshittification depending on the incoming perspective.
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
> Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
I think a pseudo random walk would be a good algo for diversity. Long form anything is being challenged, but form is an epoque attribute. In 10 years people will be lamenting how the young generation is lost in hourlong songs and encyclopaedia length posts, maybe… The only thing that got lengthier is cinema as subsumed by mini series. But it indicates a complexity in dynamics that may be harder to pin down than we think we do on the surface.
This is completely true. But there is something to be said for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things so I don't have to.
> but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
> expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things
For a long time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 - 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and industry audience sized level of shared curation experience.
That was richer in information and breadth and more niche an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the UK's Top of the Pops, Australia's Countdown, the USofA's later MTV curated new music offerings.
Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences / markets.
That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window on their website, where you can see the last few songs played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a full playlist.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.
Seems to be the case, that someone hasn't made the latent fact manifest to themselves, that they are actually on the way to become what they are missing.
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.
mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen.
And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get the chance to make that determination yourself and you get exposed to different stuff.
In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.
I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus around what is happening in the community however small.
When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day.
But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck.
One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations) grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but metric-driven checklists of features that the target group enjoys.
I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
The things I enjoyed that netflix curated for me all preexisted netflix. I bought in to netflix for the good content productions, but I stayed as long as I did for the recommendation engine.
off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember the latter more from the film than the book.
It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago?
[EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web.
I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.
I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)
I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in the early 2000. What made them useful though was that astroturfing was non existing at the time.
There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.
Now that you mention magazines, I recall that there was a lot of obscure music I discovered only by reading the guitar player magazines. But these were specialty publications, not for a general audience. And their primary advertisers were not record labels but rather instrument manufacturers.
> It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated.
1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much.
2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
> 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago.
For music, I'm not even sure the cultural creation has increased.
A few decades ago, there were scores of indie bands. In high school I knew a few friends that were playing in amateur rock bands. Later on, when I traveled in foreign lands, most people I met listened to local music, e.g. Turkish songs which were a mix of tradition and modern influence. In my latest travel, everyone was listening to the same globbish junk.
I don't have any stats, but I suspect the music production is more homogeneous and less creative. There is less geographic variation. At least one source of creation has disappeared: musical bands are dead, except for the industrial kind, à la K-pop. Overall, I don't think the creation level is higher than 25 years ago.
> 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
I disagree with the OP that the algorithms are necessarily bad. For instance, once in a while, they could suggest a very different style to help broaden your tastes. Some already do that.
But algorithms can't compare with recommendations by friends. There were music that I would have instantly rejected if the CD hadn't been given by a friend. And sometimes you have to persevere and learn to like a music. When the curator is a human I like, I try harder.
I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not to mention the musical festivals.
1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then: Breaking Bad is as good for a first binge today as it was 2008. I'm currently watching Mad Men for the first time and can't see how anything could've been made differently 18 years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from Star Trek: TNG to Breaking Bad seems like a huge leap, do these leaps exist anymore?
2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist, everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished. Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer interaction is just a waste of your time. Big studios are busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social media.
3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and efficiently.
We have ground breaking amazing shows like The Rehearsal (which could really only be made now), Resevoir Dogs, Shogun, Fleabag, The Bear, Severance, For All Mankind, Peaky Blinders…to name a few.There is so much good tv.
Some either you don’t know about any of these which is the fault of the algo I guess, or you’re stuck in a bubble of 15 years ago, in which the algo failed.
I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!). Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that each episode could be more than one short story told in this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap that makes old shows feel old now.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
Slightly OT, but it's been a long time since I've been as disappointed with anything as I was with the last season (3) of The Bear. I made it three episodes in, then deleted it. The first seasons were so good.
>The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then
Breaking Bad is almost certainly one of the best series of all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably get canceled too quickly. Then there's Grey's Anatomy because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in each week.
Re: 2, That's definitely another part of it. There's this timelessness about the current culture that I am not sure where it's coming from.
I find myself encountering bits of culture (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10 years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's so much of it now.
for point 1, i think this example is a bit biased. its not really fair to compare random shows made now to some of the greatest shows ever made.
although, i will say, it is a lot better of an experience watching old, well reviewed shows / movies, than it is to watch whatever comes out now. but again thats mainly because i can choose from some of the best productions ever.
Having watched TNG and BB for the first time roughly at the same time, I disagree it's that of a huge leap. (Quality is about much more than cinematography, and these two shows are just too different anyway.)
Also we have probably reached almost the top of what is possible for a TV show, especially in what matters the most (writing, acting).
I wasn't referring to the cinematography. While that one's certainly noticeable, I think the way the shows narrative is structured and builds up over time is the true leap. The X-Files or Twin Peaks were maybe more cohesive, but that's also because mystery box shows wouldn't work very well any other way. Maybe that's it... cohesiveness found its way into TV productions, and it took mystery box shows to make that quality really obvious as a recipe?
Deep Space 9. Star Trek starting in late in TNG's. It had actually overarching narrative and story going beyond a few episode. Though still had those self-containt episodes.
Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to get their content viewed versus any other streamer
At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard.
We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10 years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want, however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the channel to another station or to be exposed to something new that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I like.
I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping. Sometimes, at least.
But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators.
Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial).
Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited".
Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.
I think you are bringing up an interesting discussion of curation vs. word of mouth. Where exactly do you draw the line?
Players counts kept increasing because a people came across the game on social media - upvoted reddit posts, high number of retweets, streamer sponsorships, etc. And a lot of that got rolling only because of initial positive reviews and PR. But isn't upvoting/downvoting something on reddit or other social media a form of curation? Is there even such a thing as pure word of mouth on the internet?
I'll take your word for it but I have to chuckle, since I'm adjacent to some groups of gamers and I've never seen the name of this game in my life. So it goes!
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products.
Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More expensive versions of a product were generally better.
Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before".
I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.
I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
> Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!
Not all areas had a hiking app 10 years ago. I doubt is the case even today.
And then, if you were "different" than the average preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an algorithm.
The difference might be now that more people have a "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean people complain about "algorithms" but then following a hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are not an issue).
What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit with the use-cases described here of curation) would be finding "favorite" people and getting their "content" across applications. Like, now I can't check the google maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I need to find again and again the reasonable people.
Even when we do have the search tools, we have no assurance that the output of the tools is trustworthy and not biased towards whatever brings the most money to the toolmaker. And we have a lot of history with reasons to believe that our tools are not trustworthy. The software industry has shit its own bed and thoroughly lost all credibility. To the point where I have zero doubt that any new software is acting in its own best interests and not the user's.
You make a solid case for abandoning the web. To be clear, in my mind I separate “the web” from “the net”; the web exists on top of the ‘net!
The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every day.
I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day cannot come soon enough for me.
It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.
Tv tropes seems an undervalued platform for "finding media that engages with a specific idea", however the downside is that once it starts to get used for that purpose, someone will learn how to use it to push their content and then it will be worthless.
For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.
>We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins
No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.
People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.
You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.
This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.
Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).
Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help.
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation.
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
You look at the what the people you enjoy listen to or read or watch. Want more of a certain music? Find a streaming radio of that music and its just like the old radio DJ except its not 95% pop unless you want pop. Like particular videos? Look at what those video creators are subscribed to. Like certain books? Read what other people who liked that book call out or suggest om forums.
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to FB when my work sometimes demands it.
I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs, shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us, and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned and applied to others.
Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.
It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
You're not wrong, but eventually they'll run out of old ideas or consumers will grow tired of them. See Marvel/superhero burnout. The macrocycle will force the microcycle back into gear.
>immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans
Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this as a basic fact at least by grade school.
Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans? Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's less profitable. What is gratifying about that???
My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.
I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).
> Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world.
In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.
An extreme minority of irrelevant humans. You're talking about the information-economy equivalent of swearing off money and going to forage berries in the woods.
Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my kids.
I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator.
But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.
I don't see the problem. When it comes to music, who exactly is stopping you from easily, quickly, and comfortably exploring new albums in any genre or style you want via Bandcamp, RateYourMusic, Last.fm, Discogs, or Spotify?
And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)
Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.
This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.
If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it.
This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization.
I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised.
In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while.
I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective.
Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
I find it way easier to find interesting things, and communities based around them, these days. Looking back, the curators of old were highly pretentious, and the kids obsessed with being one of the first to discover something, mostly so they could gatekeep, were exactly as unbearable as they’re portrayed in shows about those times.
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
I'd agree with the jist of this article.
Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.
Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.
Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"
And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.
Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.
And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.
TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
Word of mouth annotated by chains of trust. If somebody is unknown, unless somebody else vouches for him - he is silenced, his links invisible. Vouching is somebody else giving him trust- and disappearing, if that was unearned. Your grandpa forwarding fb-pigfeed - his links invisible, except to his conspiracy cloud, that wants all and sees all.
If you want new things, you temporary lift bans on curators- people who venture and search for new things. This is all that remains of the feed, the algos die.
The social media parasites are purged and will become a warning footnote in history books.
I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth.
Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town.
There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc.
No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything.
At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that.
So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.
Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.
It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
>The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization.
Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order.
You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to review them for you and suggest which ones to read.
Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.
I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation.
I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.
But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people that you want to mingle with. However, the "standard" of shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated for your). Therefore, you do have to struggle with more subpar shows. Not sure what to do with that.
I find that I've mostly made up for that part by participating in online discussions.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
Im the complete opposite and never watch anything that is on-going because I hate waiting around for every episode and having series drawn out over months. And even after they have completed there is usually little fanfare or noticed that a season is complete and so it is only a 50% chance I will watch it at all even if I am interested in it because all the talk about it has since died and it is forgotten about because it was going on for months already.
I didn't mind what Andor did as much though for season 2 releasing 3 episodes at a time. If it had just been 1 episode at a time I probably wouldn't have seen it until a year or two from now after all discussion was dead.
I'm not at all sure that dropping an episode a week like Apple TV+ tends to do is a bad thing at all.
What you describe is and has always been everyday life for me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even then, there's usually minimal overlap.
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
You should be enjoying your own company the most, then may come others. Communities do not have to die at some point, unless you mean it in the same sense as "well, we all die at some point". You can preserve chat history of communities, but Discord these days would be pretty shit for that, I would say.
there are definitely still cultural experiences like that around release time. The last of us is huge right now.
In your particular group yes. I haven't really heard much about it (some, but not much).
This isn't an attack on you - just a further point towards a split world. Something can be huge with one group and barely heard about elsewhere.
Isn't that an old video game? Was it recently remastered like Oblivion?
It is a video game. It was remastered but not recently. It received a sequel and was adapted into a television series.
> The last of us
Never seen it. Not even sure what it's about.
They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
Ok?
[flagged]
Maybe "it" was referring to sex.
You can just use "they/them" if you don't know their gender. Much less offensive than calling someone an "it" (unless it's something they've specifically requested)
You can always watch it with them. Especially if it's great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).
I watch movies online with some friends and my girlfriend (separately), and I am 30 years old. I never liked going out to the cinema, and now I have immobility issues, so that is even less more likely, plus all my friends are abroad, so... :(
Finding friends within walking (or at least biking) distance can certainly be a hard problem (even for people in full health), but seems to be so ridiculously important for our well-being, that it's probably worth striving for.
I agree. A change of environment (to a more positive one) can save your life. I have experienced it first-hand. I have psychiatric co-morbidities (which is exacerbated by MS) but a change of environment can do wonders. The people there do not even have to be your friends (in the beginning), it can still have such a positive impact on one's mental and even physical health.
I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
This. When we become adults we tend to forget how it worked when we were children. Plus, you think you remember but you what you remember has been already filtered by the adult's mind.
Anyone with, say, a fifth grader in the US can compare notes with parents elsewhere in the country. If your experience is at all like mine you'll be startled at the (odd to me!) shared culture. Especially if they spend time online.
Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
Among those that read and study the Bible:
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
I am not sure if I agree.
I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences.
I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.
Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.
To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.
I heavily disagree with this one. On first glance what you say feels true, but there are so many mega popular people now that you will never know of despite even being from the same country. People with dozens of millions of fans, selling out arenas doing multinational tours and you won’t know them at all.
But everyone knows Britney Spears, even if you were never in her target demographic. This sort of global fame now requires so much more to reach because of how many are really locked into hyper personalized online experiences. I used to be able to reference the latest big movie or show and people would know, now that’s mostly turned into an explanation that the movie or show even came out and exists.
I mean... Taylor swift is literally the biggest musician in history... right now...
There's still enormously mainstream culture. Even more enormous in the fat tail than before.
There's just also a shocking depth in the mid tail now too.
The problem with movies is that Hollywood killed itself and tech helped. Movies and TV just suck now, for the most part.
Music, fashion, and visual culture are still alive and well.
I think Taylor Swift is actually a perfect example, it's quite common to hear people say "I don't know any song by her beyond shake it off".
I challenge anyone from the '80s not to know of a few songs by Madonna or Michael Jackson.
Taylor is huge with some fans and completely unknown to her not-fans and there seem to be a steel transition between the two states.
Michael Jackson was the biggest in history. Global megastar before the internet. Taylor Swift has a lot of sales but in terms of global significance and cultural impact there is no comparison. Not in the same league.
Taylor Swift has relatively niche popularity in India.
Chinese are blocked from accessing any western social media, and no access to YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc. Taylor Swift is popular there but the Chinese have their own version of the internet separate from ours.
I think you're both right. Relative to the past, any given locale is more culturally fragmented, but the globe is simultaneously more culturally unified. We've hit a weird midpoint: You might have more cultural common ground with someone on the other side of the globe who follows the same people on social media, than with your next-door neighbor.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine you're going to get coffee with either a random person in your neighborhood, or a random HN user. Which conversation will have more shared topics of interest?
This is the "global village" which was prophesied in the 1960s. It won't go away until interstellar colonization creates communication delays and a new era of cultural fragmentation.
> The entire world was talking about the same thing.
What you’re describing is an echo chamber. Which is what most sites optimize to produce (when optimizing for engagement and). I switch between bsky where it frequently feels that way “everyone is talking about Y” and mastodon where the chronological timeline makes it clear that a lot of people might be talking about it, but they’re also talking about other things.
I feel that one of the most broken things about our current reality (with so many social sites) is that it feels so singular and shared, but turns out that’s not the case at all. My partner and I have started to use the phrase “my internet” to refer to the general vibe we are taking in as in “is your internet talking about scandal Z?” I’m frequently surprised stuff that totally flys under their radar (and vice versa).
I think you're conflating the idea of "shared culture" with "isolation from other social groups". We used to have more friends at the same time as we had more shared context thanks to media distribution patterns.
Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared.
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone listened to those that I knew).
When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
> 800lb sisters
First time I hear of these. I now wish I had not looked them up (I did not think it would be so literal).
(I also now realise that I cannot even remember how Taylor Swift sounds like, despite hearing about her quite frequently...)
Nope you’re wrong. Actually media has become hyperlocal.
The whole world was talking about tariffs? Nope. They were talking whatever they saw on their personalised feed.
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> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now.
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
I love the variety for sure, I just miss the curation and the shared culture. It's harder to find people in person who know the same music and TV that you do.
Every silver lining has its cloud. Shared cultural touchstones came hand in hand with tastemakers and gatekeepers. We’re more directly connected to the movers and shakers than ever before, but it’s largely parasocial interaction, mediated by platforms and gated by subscriptions. We’re increasingly disintermediated with respect to creators so that we can be separated and reconstituted into our profit-bearing parts.
We’re old wine poured into new wineskins.
This has always been an issue though. I am 30 years old, and I could remember back to elementary school. I remember us bullying a girl for liking songs such a Linkin Park among other songs we (they) considered emo. For the record, I love Linkin Park now, but all the bullies never bothered to listen, and we did not know English either.
Talk to people, ask them about it, introduce them to new music and movies, listen to these songs together, or watch the movie together. That is what I do with my girlfriend. She does not have the same taste in music at all as I do. There is an overlap, since I like songs from classical to rock, but yeah.
Is it hard because of the media landscape or is it hard because you are older?
As someone who is still listening to today’s pop acts and whatnot, there are still tons of people you can talk to in person who probably listen to similar music, concerts are well-attended, etc. If anything the definition of popular has broadened to include new stuff like KPop, Latin pop, Afrobeats, etc. and I don’t have an issue finding people who like that music in person.
There are plenty of internet radios like NTS which are all about curated discovery. It's worth checking out if that's your thing!
Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
You kinda just disagreed with yourself.
Every kid having their own tailored algorithm means there is no shared cultural experience by design.
A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it, even though they are aware of it, and they can engage with their peers about it.
Tailored algorithms means maximal enjoyment and engagement at all times, but it's engagement with the software, not engagement with peers.
"A shared cultural experience means there are people in it who don't like it or don't engage with it"
You just disagreed with yourself, the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia
if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is because original post mention that most people on his hometown aware of song that got played, not every hometown on america have same experience
Hmm I take your logical point. I think I disagree with the premises though.
> the kids on america can relate to kids that live on middle east and asia ... if this not shared cultural experience, then idk what else is
This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me, but I don't really know because I'm quite distant from that kind of connection anyway.
"This sounds like parasocial connection standing in for shared cultural experience to me"
no no no, you are not understand, this is the new normal
gone long time a way for you to meet and socialize in your local community. this is the new way
You just miss old times
I agree with you that it's becoming the new normal. I just don't think the new normal is better, and the old normal still exists.
We opine the enshittification of social media platforms, but seem to largely ignore the enshittification of our in-person social norms and culture by those same platforms.
One of the reasons you have to get people in young (to any product) is so that they forget or just don't even realise/consider what life is could be like without it.
EDIT: There are definitely cultural norms and situations that the current norm improves upon too - perhaps regression to the mean is a better descriptor than enshittification depending on the incoming perspective.
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
That's precisely the problem. Everyone gets a different experience. No shared cultural experience. Until recently, everyone in the same village/town/city/country had the same experience, and could talk about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE
That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
> Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
They haven't. A nearest neighbor pseudo random walk from one viral song to the next doesn't replace a music director who could give you thematically, aesthetically or conceptually coherent selections of music.
There's an interesting observation about this at the individual album level, the death of the concept album. Albums that tell coherent two hour long narratives are effectively dead because the almighty algorithm favors the exact opposite. Disjointed, catchy , viral, hook centric music that's short enough to fit over a TikTok clip.
The medium is the message, thinking the Spotify algorithm replaces a music director is like thinking the Youtube short algorithm replaces a film director.
I think a pseudo random walk would be a good algo for diversity. Long form anything is being challenged, but form is an epoque attribute. In 10 years people will be lamenting how the young generation is lost in hourlong songs and encyclopaedia length posts, maybe… The only thing that got lengthier is cinema as subsumed by mini series. But it indicates a complexity in dynamics that may be harder to pin down than we think we do on the surface.
i like how you frame "shared cultural experience" which was mainly scarcity and lack of access due to less distribution channels as nowadays :-)
This is completely true. But there is something to be said for expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things so I don't have to.
> but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
> expert curation. Someone who spends their whole life studying these things
For a long time I followed the Peel sessions (1967 - 2004) which was BBC DJ / Commonwealth new music and industry audience sized level of shared curation experience.
That was richer in information and breadth and more niche an experience than the larger broader scale appeal of the UK's Top of the Pops, Australia's Countdown, the USofA's later MTV curated new music offerings.
Curated or not, now or in the 1960's, 70's, later there is and has always been a sizable amount of industry capture and strong influence in bringing artist's to audiences / markets.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_Sessions
> When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to.
Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.
And?
That doesn’t change the shared cultural experience. Decades had “sounds”, disco was a thing in the 70s because everyone heard it. Today there’s no shared cultural zeitgeist. You might find communities on reddit etc, but they aren’t local.
I always think it would be useful for radio stations to keep logs of their playlists.
I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like..
https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
Most do now. Most radio stations have a "now playing" window on their website, where you can see the last few songs played. If you dig in, it's a JSON with the last 10 or so songs. If you grab that JSON every 30 minutes, you'll get a full playlist.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Schools don't have bullies?
That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
Yes, I agree. I think we're at the point where tastes are more important than ever and how to differentiate in this new AI slop world.
No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)
I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/
If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.
"..Feels like a job"
Seems to be the case, that someone hasn't made the latent fact manifest to themselves, that they are actually on the way to become what they are missing.
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
Pretty much listened to what "my crowd" in college listened to. It spanned out in various other directions over time--some by organic discovery via music festivals and the like, some via friends. Mostly don't concern myself too much with "discovery" these days.
mixcloud has been great for this for me. so many people post their mixes and their radio shows there that there is always something new to explore, and searching for something slightly off that i know i like leads to people using that in a mix so i know we're at least partly on the same wavelength when i start to listen. And then eventually you end up with a list of mixtape makers/DJ's/radio show hosts you trust which is cool, really feels like a world radio show at times.
I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get the chance to make that determination yourself and you get exposed to different stuff.
In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.
I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus around what is happening in the community however small.
Good curation is amazing.
When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day.
But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck.
One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
Actually with Netflix, I'd argue that they used to produce a few shows that were great, novel, and interesting to watch. But over time, as their revenue (and shareholder expectations) grew, they started to crunch out targeted content created for specific audiences at a budget (ever noticed how the set is practically empty save for the show's protagonists at all times?). These shows suck because they're not works of art, but metric-driven checklists of features that the target group enjoys.
I assume there's a small sliver of budget available for actually interesting productions, kind of similar to Google's moonshots, but the vast majority of Netflix' catalog is just algorithmic crap by now, so the recommendations are probably solid, there's just nothing good to recommend.
The things I enjoyed that netflix curated for me all preexisted netflix. I bought in to netflix for the good content productions, but I stayed as long as I did for the recommendation engine.
off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember the latter more from the film than the book.
It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago?
[EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web.
I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.
I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)
I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in the early 2000. What made them useful though was that astroturfing was non existing at the time.
There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.
Now that you mention magazines, I recall that there was a lot of obscure music I discovered only by reading the guitar player magazines. But these were specialty publications, not for a general audience. And their primary advertisers were not record labels but rather instrument manufacturers.
> It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated.
1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much.
2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
> 1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago.
For music, I'm not even sure the cultural creation has increased.
A few decades ago, there were scores of indie bands. In high school I knew a few friends that were playing in amateur rock bands. Later on, when I traveled in foreign lands, most people I met listened to local music, e.g. Turkish songs which were a mix of tradition and modern influence. In my latest travel, everyone was listening to the same globbish junk.
I don't have any stats, but I suspect the music production is more homogeneous and less creative. There is less geographic variation. At least one source of creation has disappeared: musical bands are dead, except for the industrial kind, à la K-pop. Overall, I don't think the creation level is higher than 25 years ago.
> 2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
I disagree with the OP that the algorithms are necessarily bad. For instance, once in a while, they could suggest a very different style to help broaden your tastes. Some already do that.
But algorithms can't compare with recommendations by friends. There were music that I would have instantly rejected if the CD hadn't been given by a friend. And sometimes you have to persevere and learn to like a music. When the curator is a human I like, I try harder.
I'm sorry, but by what metric are musical bands "dead"? I'm asking because I follow a lot of bands that are actively releasing new music and touring across the US and Europe. Not to mention the musical festivals.
I would make a different list of points:
1. The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then: Breaking Bad is as good for a first binge today as it was 2008. I'm currently watching Mad Men for the first time and can't see how anything could've been made differently 18 years(!) ago. That's 7 seasons of a well-made show and I couldn't care less for any Netflix production that gets cancelled after its 2nd season. The change in quality from Star Trek: TNG to Breaking Bad seems like a huge leap, do these leaps exist anymore?
2. There is no discussion about any current Zeitgeist, everything feels intermixed and nothing is ever finished. Leaving politics aside here, consumers are beta testers without any way to provide direct feedback to producers (one that isn't public outrage of some kind) - every other usual customer interaction is just a waste of your time. Big studios are busy milking "universes" that have been created pre-social media.
3. Algorithms are part of the creation for these problems, not their solution. Big tech just doesn't like this take, creative work is risky, businesses need to scale up quickly and efficiently.
We have ground breaking amazing shows like The Rehearsal (which could really only be made now), Resevoir Dogs, Shogun, Fleabag, The Bear, Severance, For All Mankind, Peaky Blinders…to name a few.There is so much good tv.
Some either you don’t know about any of these which is the fault of the algo I guess, or you’re stuck in a bubble of 15 years ago, in which the algo failed.
I think my point didn't quite come across... Comedy got way more serious and certainly made that (necessary) leap after a big dive in quality during the 00s (thanks Chuck Lorre!). Writers of other genres learned from the successful HBO and AMC productions that TV shows are more than just a fixed universe with a static cast and a dynamic part, and that each episode could be more than one short story told in this staged universe - that is the main part in the leap that makes old shows feel old now.
Thanks for the recommendations, didn't know about The Rehearsal, Shogun, and Reservation Dogs (you wrote "Resevoir Dogs"?). Our tastes may wary, but I think For All Mankind fell back to some 90s formula after season 2.
Slightly OT, but it's been a long time since I've been as disappointed with anything as I was with the last season (3) of The Bear. I made it three episodes in, then deleted it. The first seasons were so good.
>The "new" of today is no match for the "new" of back then
Breaking Bad is almost certainly one of the best series of all time that started strong and ended strong. There were a TON of shows in that period that were weak or that, at a minimum, sort of petered out. Yes, a lot of shows probably get canceled too quickly. Then there's Grey's Anatomy because it still apparently has lazy viewers who will tune in each week.
Re: 2, That's definitely another part of it. There's this timelessness about the current culture that I am not sure where it's coming from.
I find myself encountering bits of culture (tv/movies/music/books) that could be from today, or from 10 years ago, and little way to determine from when. And there's so much of it now.
for point 1, i think this example is a bit biased. its not really fair to compare random shows made now to some of the greatest shows ever made.
although, i will say, it is a lot better of an experience watching old, well reviewed shows / movies, than it is to watch whatever comes out now. but again thats mainly because i can choose from some of the best productions ever.
Having watched TNG and BB for the first time roughly at the same time, I disagree it's that of a huge leap. (Quality is about much more than cinematography, and these two shows are just too different anyway.)
Also we have probably reached almost the top of what is possible for a TV show, especially in what matters the most (writing, acting).
I wasn't referring to the cinematography. While that one's certainly noticeable, I think the way the shows narrative is structured and builds up over time is the true leap. The X-Files or Twin Peaks were maybe more cohesive, but that's also because mystery box shows wouldn't work very well any other way. Maybe that's it... cohesiveness found its way into TV productions, and it took mystery box shows to make that quality really obvious as a recipe?
Deep Space 9. Star Trek starting in late in TNG's. It had actually overarching narrative and story going beyond a few episode. Though still had those self-containt episodes.
The algorithms are a poor match because they were primarily developed to benefit content providers, not users.
Oh that's definitely true. I mean you can definitely see the conflict of interest between say you know HBO Max trying to get their content viewed versus any other streamer
At a beach rental house this week and they have some sort of internet television and no cable with a guide of channels playing whatever right now. I can stream anything I want at any time but I can't just watch the hockey game that's on right now without signing into something. It shouldn't be this hard.
We keep a Sirius subscription even though it occurred to me 10 years ago that Apple Music has largely everything I need. I want, however, to hear stuff I don't like that forces me to change the channel to another station or to be exposed to something new that's not like the last thing the algorithm already knows I like.
Infinite choice is horrible.
I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping. Sometimes, at least.
But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators.
Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial).
Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited".
https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/pc/all/all-time/metas...
Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.
https://steamdb.info/app/1903340/charts/
I think you are bringing up an interesting discussion of curation vs. word of mouth. Where exactly do you draw the line?
Players counts kept increasing because a people came across the game on social media - upvoted reddit posts, high number of retweets, streamer sponsorships, etc. And a lot of that got rolling only because of initial positive reviews and PR. But isn't upvoting/downvoting something on reddit or other social media a form of curation? Is there even such a thing as pure word of mouth on the internet?
I'll take your word for it but I have to chuckle, since I'm adjacent to some groups of gamers and I've never seen the name of this game in my life. So it goes!
Word of mouth is a form of curation.
It was also partially through marketing and curation (which overlap).
But these, as well as word of mouth, are the least needed for something so popular.
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products. Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
The consumer landscape has gotten so hostile. Once upon a time you could use price as a proxy for evaluating quality. More expensive versions of a product were generally better.
Nowadays it's all smoke and mirrors; marketing, branding and lies. In general I find even the more expensive versions of consumer products are still garbage quality which end up in a landfill all to quickly. It's hard to buy something good even if you're willing to spend the money. Our current capitalism doesn't care about providing value for the money, no it's all about how much money to can squeeze out of people and how low you can make your production costs.
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
I honestly think we have more tools and they are more powerful than "before".
I would give an example: find a weekend hike.
Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Now: multiple websites both hike focused and more generic that give you reviews, photos, comments. Generic websites (openstreetmap, google maps) that allow you to check further details if you wish so, some with open data.
I think people should take more responsibility and stop blaming so much "the algorithm" and "the profit". It's the same as with smoking. Even if most people agree it is bad for health, 1 in 5 people still smoke.
> Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.
Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!
(Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)
Not all areas had a hiking app 10 years ago. I doubt is the case even today.
And then, if you were "different" than the average preference, you had to put the effort to select the stuff good for you. Not that different to "fighting" an algorithm.
The difference might be now that more people have a "chance" to find what they want, and "before" there was just a "specific group" that was happy. I get that "the specific group" might feel "is worse" in such a case.
Regarding the quality, I hate "following the hike" (I mean people complain about "algorithms" but then following a hike is fine ...?) - I just have some markers and look each 15 minutes on the map (which also means back and forths are not an issue).
What I would love to see more often (and maybe would fit with the use-cases described here of curation) would be finding "favorite" people and getting their "content" across applications. Like, now I can't check the google maps reviews of people that I follow on strava or on Instagram or of editors of openstreetmap... Everybody does their own little walled garden (which I am fine with) but I need to find again and again the reasonable people.
Even when we do have the search tools, we have no assurance that the output of the tools is trustworthy and not biased towards whatever brings the most money to the toolmaker. And we have a lot of history with reasons to believe that our tools are not trustworthy. The software industry has shit its own bed and thoroughly lost all credibility. To the point where I have zero doubt that any new software is acting in its own best interests and not the user's.
You make a solid case for abandoning the web. To be clear, in my mind I separate “the web” from “the net”; the web exists on top of the ‘net!
The web has become a cesspool of AI slop, SEO trash, walled gardens, and of course, bots of all kinds seeking entry points to everything. The dead internet theory seems more real every day.
I think humanity will ultimately abandon the web. The day cannot come soon enough for me.
The net has also gone to shit with ISPs blocking things, NAT and CGNAT. (I'd ignore CGNAT if every ISP with CGNAT also supplied IPv6, but they don't)
It's no complete solution against AI slop but I've been working on www.webring.gg which is a democratic webring manager. To join, websites are invited and voted on by current members to keep slop from polluting the integrity of the webring.
Kinda wild to read a post on here so true it stops you in your tracks. People are missing a lot of opportunities.
Tv tropes seems an undervalued platform for "finding media that engages with a specific idea", however the downside is that once it starts to get used for that purpose, someone will learn how to use it to push their content and then it will be worthless.
For curation to work, you have to trust the currator.
Platforms are closed by definition, if it's open source it's not a platform any more.
>We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins
No. Not really, no. We have like 20 open source platforms already. Nobody uses most of them. The ones that people do use are extremely boring compared to any closed platform because they were created for the worst possible use of social media: letting people post their opinions online. For the average user they often lack highly requested features like making profiles private because the open source platforms decided to be decentralized as well adding enormous complexity to them. That also comes with privacy issues like making all your likes public.
People could just use Tumblr if they wanted. Text posts of any length, add as many images as you want anywhere in the post you want, share music, videos, reblog other's posts. But people don't go to Tumblr.
You could create the perfect platform but people still wouldn't use it because they are too addicted to drama, arguing online, and doomscrolling to calmly scroll through a curated catalog of music that someone spend 3 years publishing on their blog.
This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.
Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).
Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
There are some explicit efforts to surface smaller/indie websites, like web rings and e.g. Kagi’s small web features[1]. These kinds of things might help.
1: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation.
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
What opensource tools are you talking about here? The only ones I know of is just building your own rss feed.
You look at the what the people you enjoy listen to or read or watch. Want more of a certain music? Find a streaming radio of that music and its just like the old radio DJ except its not 95% pop unless you want pop. Like particular videos? Look at what those video creators are subscribed to. Like certain books? Read what other people who liked that book call out or suggest om forums.
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
Curation isn't that big of a problem as is stated. Especially when it becomes gatekeeping.
It is more important that there is possibility of unrestricted discoverability and exploration than having curation.
> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to FB when my work sometimes demands it.
I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs, shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us, and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned and applied to others.
Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.
It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
The problem is that the economic forces here aren't nearly as interested in discovering human taste/interests as opposed to causing them.
For them, the lack of authenticity is not a bug, but a feature.
You're not wrong, but eventually they'll run out of old ideas or consumers will grow tired of them. See Marvel/superhero burnout. The macrocycle will force the microcycle back into gear.
>immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans
Just to confirm, this is sarcasm, right? It's hard to tell, and it's terrifying to me that so many people don't comprehend this as a basic fact at least by grade school.
Also, is it still gratifying if humans won't have other humans? Curation is harder to come by than ever before because it's less profitable. What is gratifying about that???
Not sarcasm.
My comment is a reaction to this idea that a ChatGPT-generated image has the same value as one done by a Picasso. It's still art and it still can have artistic value, but it'll never possess the intangibles carried by, say, Guernica.
I think curation, in the age of procedurally-generated content, will be one of the most gratifying or at least profitable jobs to have. It already is, if you think about it; film studio heads, music producers like Rick Rubin, Anna Wintour/Vogue, and the MoMA... all wield curatorial power (for better or for worse).
But about half of the human population objectively does not and will never care about those intangibles.
> Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Infinite context models will understand everything about your life. Combined with real-time lookup of all content ever created alongside the ability to generate new content on demand, curation seems destined to be solved.
If that's true it would be a sad outcome, I believe people would react against such an artificial world.
In a music DJ context: even if an AI was able to mimic the dopest turntablist moves and factor in layers of depth and groove and create unique mixes, it would still be an artificial mix made by AI, and so not as valuable or worthwhile as a human DJ. That doesn't mean that AI DJs or musicians won't be successful, they just won't be human and can never be human, and that means something.
This will never happen without the destruction of the individual.
Humans will simply opt out and create their own islands of ideology or taste, and have been doing exactly that for millennia.
An extreme minority of irrelevant humans. You're talking about the information-economy equivalent of swearing off money and going to forage berries in the woods.
Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
[1] https://radioparadise.com/home
Thank you this is great!
Maybe IPTV is an interesting source of curated entertainment
This playlist has hundreds of channels: https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u
Github page: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
Another source could be following respected critics who have similar tastes to you, like the film critic Roger Ebert:
https://rogerebert.com/reviews
I've been a subscriber for the hacker newsletter [1] for years and it does a great job of curating content from this website.
This inspired me to create The Gaming Pub [2] which is a similar kind of curated newsletter but for gaming content.
I believe newsletters like that are a great way to find interesting stuff.
1. https://hackernewsletter.com/
2. https://www.thegamingpub.com/
Thanks for the HNL mention and nice job with The Gaming Pub!
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my kids.
I am a bit of a snob (a huge one if I’m being honest) about media I consume. Naturally I guide the content my kids watch quite closely, much closer than my peers. I am their curator.
But I can’t help but feel I am isolating my kids when I do this. The things they watch and listen and play and read at home are vastly different than other kids their age.
Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation
https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that...
That’s amazing. The post date is cherry on top.
you dont. youre brought things inside your algo bubble. kind of a bummer of an evolution of the net.
I don't see the problem. When it comes to music, who exactly is stopping you from easily, quickly, and comfortably exploring new albums in any genre or style you want via Bandcamp, RateYourMusic, Last.fm, Discogs, or Spotify?
Peep Soma FM too
Cant find the OG quoter but "Wikipedia doesn't work in theory but does work IRL"
Machine learning algorithms.
And they're doing a fine job of it too, even if they remove the shared cultural experience. (Which is a big loss, to be sure. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem cover the American Top 40 on the radio...)
Which is also curation
> You then have to hunt around for the info
Have you considered that that might be the goal of releasing trickles of information about the film prior to its official release? It makes collected information feel more exclusive to super fans and encourages fans to interact with each other on social media providing fuel for Bjork focused communities. If collecting this information feels exhausting instead of exciting to you... why are you trying so hard to collect it? Just wait for the actual release.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
I don't understand how you expect a critic to tell you whether its worth your time based on a collection of pre-release rumors and interviews. For deciding if its worth my time, I mainly want to hear from critics who have seen the upcoming media and I want to hear their opinion on what they saw. Why would I care to hear Ebert and Roeper's opinion on what the actors said in their press release tour? Unless it was something especially newsworthy and they wouldn't need to go digging for that. I just don't see how a critic's review would be enhanced by "devoting their lives to browsing through the piles".
Curation is still around, it’s just a bit less easy to get. The local venues are filling that role now. Take a listen on the “what’s on” page.
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.
This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
> It makes art (music, film, tv, etc.) seem like one big sludge pile. It makes it feel vast and exhausting, like an endless list of things that you'll never get to the end of.
If that is not hyperbole and the author is not taking steps to distance themselves from those feelings, that is extremely unhealthy. Like an addiction or something.
The only thing that should feel like that is laundry.
Perhaps the author should rebalance their leisure activities portfolio to include more things that aren't pop culture media.
This article resonates so bad with me, like as if I did write it.
This all the author writes about is called collapse of context. And people been waking up to noticing it, writing about it, eventually becoming victims. Everyone who previously had a natural sect of some subculture is failing victing the moment they move the member base into faang social media. It kills the opportunity to mold your community around itself - it gets molded for monetization.
I dream the day when using social media would be considered as bad as a smoking or drinking habit, the endless scroll of mostly irrelevant content. Because even curated accounts are bombarded with advertised noised.
In recent years I wake up to the fact that I keep meeting people who are totally supposed to be in my bubble, very similar, lived in the same city, not a big one, 2m, but we have not found each other because of media noise, and technological alienation. Its amazing as if living in the black mirror already and for a while.
I keep investing massive efforts to get any public events gathering people spending hundreds of euros for promotion, prominent artists, in a time when delivery of information is supposed to be immediate. The audience, which includes all of us, fail to notice the information as there is so much of it. faang is milking everyone like crazy for the right to get to people supposed to be subscribed to our own content, which we don't own. it totally makes sense to have vanilla html at this point as i did with my event yesterday (tickets.dubigxbi.com), but then again - i need to submit a bribe to techbros to even let me emerge in the information sphere. like, I started considering running a bot farm, because this is what they deserve. 500$ of ads gets me mostly bot traffic, it is insane, paid advertising has never been so ineffective.
Besides, the way many grow to behave, and not only the young generation, is that they get addicted to endless scrollers in tiktok/insta/x and it is not us/them anymore searching the information. It is algorithms packing it for everyone, which is amazing way to put tubes in everyone's eyes and minds and feed it hallucinations of all sorts. But it is the world we woke into.
I’m curious about your vernacular/cadence.
I find it way easier to find interesting things, and communities based around them, these days. Looking back, the curators of old were highly pretentious, and the kids obsessed with being one of the first to discover something, mostly so they could gatekeep, were exactly as unbearable as they’re portrayed in shows about those times.
Thanks for the great post.
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
I'd agree with the jist of this article. Social media has been less "wisdom of crowds" and more endless algorithmic slop and pay-to-play influencers.
Sure there was always PR dealmaking & money behinds the scenes previously I'm sure, but there were actual magazines/websites/etc in every genre publishing numerical reviews for cars/cameras/games/movies/shows/albums/etc. If you paid attention you could figure out which curators scoring aligned with what you tended to like.
Now every reviewer is a YouTube influencer who loves every product put in front of them, no product is every bad, no scores are assigned because then you can cross compare, etc.
The acquisition, death, resurrection and mundane ongoing existence of dpreview is a good example of this.
What we had before wasn't perfect, but what has followed is worse.
If everything is curated to only include what pays the highest affiliate commission, how will we find good things that don't include a large marketing expense in their cost?
Well, originally, the answer to this question was "search engines, like Google"
And, for a while, this worked pretty well. The breaking point for me was when Google bought pompous-restaurant-ranker Zagat and proceeded to disappear their curated reviews into something that would nowadays best be described as "an AI blackhole". And that was in 2011, mind you.
Of course, Zagat going away was an entirely elitist event with no consequence to the Internet-or-society-as-a-whole whatsoever, but for me, it was the moment I realized that democratized data-ranking would never provide any real value.
And the whole "AI" story is pretty much history repeating: unless actual-humans-with-distinguisable options feed "the algorithm", the output will be... well, slop.
TL;DR: curation by actual living, thinking and critical humans (which automatically excludes most "best of" repositories on Github, BTW) is still the way forward.
LLMs will be able to learn what we do and don't like.
And try to serve that.
Or try to serve it's agenda despite those likes.
In the real world.
I asked o3 about bjorks latest releases and news — it did a great job.
A machine learning algorithm that summarizes and hallucinates information is arguably worse than a machine learning algorithm that decides which social media posts you see. They're both controlled by corporations, but at least on social media you (still) have the option to read content written by humans.
Word of mouth annotated by chains of trust. If somebody is unknown, unless somebody else vouches for him - he is silenced, his links invisible. Vouching is somebody else giving him trust- and disappearing, if that was unearned. Your grandpa forwarding fb-pigfeed - his links invisible, except to his conspiracy cloud, that wants all and sees all. If you want new things, you temporary lift bans on curators- people who venture and search for new things. This is all that remains of the feed, the algos die. The social media parasites are purged and will become a warning footnote in history books.
I listened to punk in the 70's and hardcore from 80 to 84, nothing was curated by some authoritative source. It was all word of mouth.
Hardcore wasn't on the radio, it wasn't on TV (OK, "TV Party" and "Institutionalized" were on MTV, both of which were "joke" hardcore songs), you couldn't buy the records in the record stores in my town until the mid-80s, you couldn't buy the zines in my town.
There was a tiny amount of it played on college radio, but it would be something like one show a week from 2 AM to 3 AM on Sunday morning. Kids would drive from where I lived to the "city" and drive around in their cars taping that show from the car radio to a boombox and then pass those tapes around to get copied. It was samizdat. And most hardcore they couldn't even play on those radio shows anyway. "We don't care what you say, fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you! FUCK YOU!!!" Great song, can't hear it on the radio. Can't hear it anywhere you go.
We found things. You had to really dig, but we found things. No one curated it for us. I hate the very idea of it. I mean my friend Joe "curated" music for me when he made me a tape of the Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and DOA in 6th grade in 1981, but I don't think that is the meaning of curation that the title is referring to. If a kid got a record, it got passed around and taped. Then those tapes got passed around and taped. Etc.
No one tells me what music I should listen to, we told the musicians what kind of music we wanted to hear when we were in the pit. Many of them noped out from that. They were artists, not enablers of the violent tendencies of poorly parented 14 year olds. Fair enough. But we were finding things out.
> We need critics who devote their lives to browsing through the pile and telling us what is worth our time and what isn't.
No thanks. The last time this happened we ended up with opinionated articles, hidden promotions, and censorship in news, media, newspapers, etc.
A good example:
try searching for "fluoride residue in brain" on Google vs Yandex and see how they tell totally opposite stories.
And now that no one trusts any kind of expert, we've ended up with millions of various conspiracy peddlers believed by billions too uneducated to even begin to parse fact from fiction. Sort of like taking the centralized religion/opinion/censorship problem and smashing it into tiny shards that get on everything.
At least when there were 2, 3, or 10 curated sides to a story, with sources and expertise to draw on, a somewhat literate person could draw some conclusions on which parts of each were valid.
Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that.
So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
Mens rights arent a conspiracy theory, but are often used as dull propaganda in the same way.
It sucks because theres a group local to me that does free information sessions and bbq meet ups in front of the local family court house.
But online MRA's have given them such a bad name with terrible behaviour.
It was easier to find good stuff back then tho. For all complains about hidden promotions, situation now is worst.
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.
Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.
It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
Curation is more like representative democracy. You elect the curators you trust the most.
Democratization is micro-curation. What we have now is not that. We have monolithic platforms - the richest companies in the world, or companies owned by the richest people in the world - serving content as they see fit, with a veneer of what your friends, family, and favorite celebrities want to to show you. We are back to, "Brought to you by GE!", for all intents and purposes. Right down to them telling us who to vote for.
>The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization.
Unless you are going to read every book, watch every movie, listen to every song you are going to consult others about their own experiences, or have an algorithm or radio station feed it to you in their own curated order.
You didnt defeat trust, you just trust different people now.
No, they're right. If you have "democratization", you don't necessarily read every book yourself, but there are lots of competent or incompetent people you can choose to trust to review them for you and suggest which ones to read.
Which means people who choose to trust different sources will get different cultural experiences.